Arabic Dialect History and Historical Linguistic Mythology

In Jonathan Owens's article, Arabic Dialect History and Historical Linguistic Mythology he reflects on the flaws with previous studies of the Arabic language and applies his own method, mapping, in a sense, the spread of three different dialectical forms from the eastern dialectical regions to North Africa and even isolated dialects of Arabic in more central Africa. He states first that historical linguistic principles have not been used frequently to analyze the Arabic language. In the past, most studies have been done on individual dialects. Two problems he identifies with studying Arabic are, 1: reconstructions of Arabic based on dialects eventually have to come back to one language. However, identifying variations is extremely difficult and the researcher always must consider whether the dialect is pre or post diaspora or is reflecting pre existing diversity on the Arabian peninsula. A second problem with studies is that they revolve around linguistic feature attributed to a specific historical region. The problem is that they are based on contemporary dialectical distribution rather than historical.
Owens goes on to map the differences between regions using the Arabic first person singular and plural imperfect verbs: I/we write 1) bektob/mnektob 2) aktib/nikitbu 3) niktib/nikitbu.
His study will be useful for the aspect of my project studying the origins of arabic dialects and it does contain specifics about certain dialects that I could use. I also learned that it is more complicated to find these origins that I originally thought.